My desire is to grapple together here over how well off we are with God through Christ,
and to live from His opinion of us.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Love Is That Sync-ing Feeling

If you could spend just one day with nothing more to do than to know the love that God has for you, what effect would that day have on you? What would God’s love for you do for you? Think about it for a moment.

I’ll put it this way:

If “love is patient,” then what do you want? If love is kind, if love does not envy, if it does not boast and is not proud, then what do you want? If love does not dishonor others and is not self-seeking, and if love is not easily angered and keeps no record of wrongs, then what do you want? If love does not delight in evil, if love rejoices in the truth, and if love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres, then what do you want?

You want love. You want the love of God.

Perhaps one of the biggest rip-offs suffered by a Christian is to believe the assertion that 1 Corinthians 13 (“The Love Chapter”) is about how we’re supposed to act and behave with one another in order to prove that we’re loving. To the contrary, it’s about the triumph and joy of God’s love expressed to us, and what the effect will be like for those who know Him.

This is what God’s love is like for us—it’s incredibly fantastic! The best there is. Read about His love for you, and listen for Him to tell you and show you all about it. And Love will find a way out of you toward others, too. They won’t mind that at all! And it’s not meant to be difficult. If you are in Christ and He is in you, then where is love? In truth, you have His love to the full already. If we believe the lie that we do not have love, that we do not have the truth, that we do not know the way, or that we do not have a life, then we believe that God has not happily made His home in us.

It’s then that many people begin to approach the Bible as an instruction manual, a book of how-to’s which, if properly employed, will please God and induce His favor. . .from outside of us.

If, then, we are instructed "how to love" and we make the attempt to do it, to be kind, to be patient, to not be selfish, to not get angry, etc., we are induced to think of ourselves as separate from God with a lot of work to do—a lot of loving to do. Although it is impossible to actually draw away from God in order to do something (you are in Him and He is in you), we do it in our thinking. This is not only error, it is dangerous to us and might establish a pattern of expecting very little from the love of God.

What you want—all that you truly want—you already have. You have Him. You’re in union, you’re in sync with love. Have you been looking elsewhere?

"And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us." Romans 5:5